Here we go again, another impending book launch! I am pleased to announce that the third entry in The Augment Saga, The Flight of the Aurora: An Augment Saga Novella, will be releasing to the world on Tuesday 20th September 2022. It is a real honour that so many of you have read and enjoyed my books thus far, and it is my joy and privilege to present this novella to you: another step in the epic sci-fi adventure that’s been rattling around in my brain for decades.

Very unusually for me, I went straight into Ephemeris immediately after finishing Heliopause. I have so many books on my TBR that I tend to like jumping around, like sampling everything at a buffet. But this time, I went straight from book one to book two in the same series! Ephemeris has an odd description: it’s a prequel, sequel and concurrent companion piece to Heliopause all at the same time. This kind of out of the box thinking is one of the many reasons I have come to love indie publishing.

Once again, I’ll be partnering with Narratess for another mega sale, this time for #IndieAugust, celebrating independent speculative fiction authors. August 6th and 7th, the ebook of From the Grave of the Gods will be discounted for the sale hosted by Tessa Hastjarjanto of Narratess.com. As in April, I'll be running a Kindle Countdown Deal for the US and UK marketplaces at 99p/99¢, and dropping the price in all other marketplaces as much as I can.

As with all the books on my TBR, I’ve been meaning to read the Questrison Saga for a good long while now, ever since I first saw J. Dianne Dotson pop up in the Twitter writing community, and now here we are: Heliopause, the first book in the four-part space opera series. In many ways I’ve felt like Dianne’s passion to create this universe that’s sat with her for a long time has parallels with my own approach to the Augment Saga. And that’s intriguing.

Science fiction and futurism are not exclusive to any one culture, and often we find ourselves - in the white western world, at least - reading all our SFF from the same cultural sources. However, we are enriched both as readers and writers when we diversify the types of stories we read in our beloved genre. It makes us more understanding, gives us greater empathy, and broadens our scope for ideas. There are wonderful stories out there from people writing from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and early on in my renewed reading journey, I decided…

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a full year since the world was first introduced to Seventeen and the crew of the Qesh’kal, kicking off the epic story of The Augment Saga; a whole year since I became a published indie author! Since then it’s been a wild ride through many unknowns, with new experiences, new friends in the Writing Community, and facing new challenges; an emotional roller coaster of heartache, pride and joy, frustration and relief…

This was a tricky book to review. I had been meaning to pick up Faraway Sky, Ocean Deep for a long time - ever since Alan announced he had completed his first NaNoWriMo project, in fact, which is an amazing achievement all its own. Writing over fifty thousand words in a single month is mind boggling to me, and I absolutely applaud his determination and discipline in getting it done.

My next novella in the Augment Saga, The Flight of the Aurora, has returned from its beta reading phase and I am busy implementing the changes. I am immensely grateful to my beta readers for looking through my work and providing their invaluable feedback. Thankfully, there’s nothing major to adjust, so after another couple of editing passes, I’ll commence work on typesetting the thing - a process that ought to be easier this time around because I will be using my file for The Re-Emergence as a template.

An intriguing science fiction novella by James McLean, offering a taste of things to come. I received a copy of this book after the author ran a giveaway on Twitter around its release, and I was thrilled (and surprised) to have won! Carrion Crew is a sci-fi novella by James McLean, who you may remember as one of the authors I recently interviewed.

The Lords of Midnight is an adventure strategy game that was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1984, written and created by Mike Singleton. This 2018 novel - the first in the Midnight Chronicles - by Drew Wagar is the official novelisation of that classic game. The story behind the creation of this book is a fascinating tale all on its own, but one I’ll leave to Drew (contained within the book’s Author’s Note). Now, I need to be clear here: I never played the game - it came out four years before I was born - in fact I hadn’t heard of it until relatively recently.

From 18th - 22nd April, I’ll be partnering with Narratess for the first #indieapril mega sale, celebrating independent speculative fiction authors. April is the month we in the Writing Community celebrate independent authors, and there’s something extra special on the horizon this year. During the third week of the month, I and over 70 other indie authors will be taking part in an absolutely huge sale on speculative fiction books, hosted by Narratess.com.

When I first read Dune, I knew I wanted to continue to read more in the series. I really enjoyed the first and wrote a review to that effect here. My appreciation for the book only deepened when I finally got a chance to see Denis Villeneuve’s masterful film adaptation of its first half, and I am absolutely hyped for the next installment. Meanwhile, I will be sporadically reading my way through the rest of Frank Herbert’s six-part series…

What I really want is for this post to act as a sort of resource for other new writers who are thinking about self-publishing, particularly when it comes to IngramSpark and Amazon KDP. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet to help with self-publishing, and I’ve read a lot of it over the last two years as I’ve gradually brought my books to release, but there were still a few things that didn’t become clear to me until From the Grave of the Gods went live. So if this helps shed some light for new writers, that would be amazing. So, strap in because this will be a long one.

The fantastic speculative fiction short story collection from Gary J. Mack. Grab a punnet! One of the really unexpected things I’ve discovered since getting back into reading fiction is how much I enjoy anthologies. I started on that route with the excellent Nine Streams of Consciousness and was pleasantly surprised, and I’ve since added a few to my TBR list. Impossible Fruit by Gary J. Mack is my second such short story collection, and it is absolutely fantastic.

The multi-award winning utopian science fiction novel in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish universe. Jeez, people, just please read this book. Honestly. This is the first time I’ve gotten to open up my new Library of America hardbacks of Le Guin’s Hainish series, and they’re wonderful. This story is in volume two of the set. The reading experience was much better than I expected. Normally I’m a lover of paperbacks, and to a lesser extent, ebooks. I’ll choose either of those over a hardback.

IT IS DONE! I have finally finished the first significant draft of The Flight of the Aurora, the next entry in the Augment Saga. Hooray! This book takes place fifteen years after the events of From the Grave of the Gods, and continues to follow James and Angela on another adventure. This one is meant to bridge what will be a significant time gap between the first and second full-length novels…

The time has finally come. The Great and Terrible day of Alan K. Dell is upon us. One thousand humans (presumably) have pledged their allegiance - nay, their very souls - to me, in support of my evil schemes. Muhuahahahaaaa! Lol it’s not all that dramatic. But I am so incredibly grateful to all those who have hit that follow button on Twitter to see more of my nonsense on their timelines. I can’t quite believe it: 1000 followers…

I have a confession to make: I read one of these novelettes around the middle of last year, but I totally blanked on doing a proper review of it here on the blog. That was Investation, the perma-free short fiction available from Frasier’s website for newsletter signups. So, since I recently got done reading his newest work, Rememory, I thought I would rectify my error and review both now

Time for another review for an indie book I encountered from the ever-wonderful Twitter Writing Community. This time it’s Aerth’s Aetheric Aegis: The White Mantle by Velora Venn. I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while, and I finally started it in December, finishing it in the last day or so, which makes it my first review of 2022! Hooray! Now, they say not to judge a book by its cover, but when I first saw this book, I was immediately entranced by its fantastic artwork (and come on, admit it, we’re all suckers for great cover art to varying degrees). In short, I think it’s a stunning looking book and the author should be rightly proud of the incredible work she’s done illustrating this.

It’s been a little while since I shared a writing update on the blog, so I thought, as it’s New Year, it was time to let you all know what I’ve been doing since the release of From the Grave of the Gods. Well, first of all, after I picked myself up off the floor from the absolutely incredible launch of my first novel (which is now sitting at well over 60 sales), I continued working on my next novella, The Flight of the Aurora. If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you’ll know that in response to some very valuable beta reader feedback, I had to cut my draft of From the Grave of the Gods into two novels. The first of which became the one I took to publication in November this year.